AstLinux Record Phone Calls to External USB Flash Drive Part 1

by Jon on June 22nd, 2014

I use AstLinux running on an Alix board at home for my personal phone calls. Alix boards are small and lightweight so it works very well in a low call volume environment. The system has worked very well for me but I have wanted to add call recording to give me the ability to go back and listen to a call for a phone number or address something I may have missed. Of course if you are going to carry out this make sure you know the laws in your state about legal call recording.

With that disclaimer out-of-the-way let’s configure call recording to an external USB drive.

1. First plug your USB drive into an available port on the board. Don’t worry about the format of the file system just make sure you don’t have anything important on the drive because everything gets deleted.

2. Find out how to reference the USB key by doing the following command. # fdisk -l

3. Now here is the part we will delete everything on the drive. To do this we need the /dev/sXX from the prior command, in this instance I used # fdisk /dev/sdb you will then use the d key to delete until all partitions are deleted and w to write the changes.

4. The next step is to create a linux partition on the drive so we use the same # fdisk /dev/sdb command and then use n for new partition followed by the enter key a couple of times for the default options and w again to write the partition.

5. The drive has a partition on it but it has not been formatted so this step will format the drive to a readable format. # mke2fs -q -L ASTREC /dev/sdb1